Tips for using Vistaprint in the Classroom

Happy Summer from Texas.  I'm Deniece from This Little Piggy Reads.  As you read this, I'm at a waterpark with a couple of friends and their kiddos.  I hope it's sunny and not rainy!

Last year I decided to be creative & choose a unique classroom theme - mermaids (click here to see the final product).  Well, the good part is that no else had it.  The bad part was that I had to create an entire classroom from scratch - I couldn't just grab something at the Teacher Store.  If I wanted it, I had to make it.  So, I got to work in JUNE.  In July I found a Groupon for $75 at Vistaprint for only $17!  What a deal!!  I ended up spending an extra $25 because I decided I'd rather have $25 worth of product than spend $22 on shipping.  SCORE!  I knew I had to get busy making things to match my theme.  Thanks to Erin from Lovin' Lit, I had a color scheme and amazing coordinating papers.  

Some of the things I got were...

A vinyl banner that hangs outside my classroom door.  I uploaded my own design that I created in .ppt.

 This is a set of address labels.  The plan was to put them into my students' agendas when their behavior needed adjustment.

These are both little stamps.  Looking back, I would only put 1-2 words on each stamp or I'd get a bigger stamp.

This is another set of address labels.  I planned to put it into the student's agenda to let parents know that their child had missing homework.  

      

Two years ago, I ordered magnets that had our reading strategies for our state test on them.  Parents and students loved these!  I worked on a team of 3 departmentalized teachers (each of us taught a different subject to the same 65 students).  I ordered a business card with each of our contact e-mails & our prep times.  We stapled it into the students' agenda at the beginning of the year.  This gave parents quick access to all of our contact info.    

Have you ever used Vistaprint for your classroom?  Happy Summer!